In a place such as an enterprise where a great number of information processing systems are utilized, system administrators exist separately from system users and monitor and cope with problems each hindering or having a possibility of hindering an operation of the system, such as a fault and abnormality in processing.
The information processing system includes multiple components that are roughly classified into hardware which performs an arithmetic process, a storage process, a display process and a communication process, and software such as an OS (Operating System), an application program and firmware that are used for these processes. Therefore, the system administrator is burdened with an operation of, if the problem such as the fault and the processing abnormality arises, examining which component causes the problem.
Such being the case, pieces of operation management software are developed for the purpose of reducing the loads on the management operations and are utilized by the administrators.
For example, if the problem occurs in a management target information processing system, the operation management software has a function of notifying the administrator of the problem through an alarm using a popup message, a mail, etc.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of the alarm by a popup message. As depicted in FIG. 1, the operation management software displays items of information such as a node with the occurrence of the problem, a date/time thereof, seriousness thereof and a content of the alarm.
The administrator, who knew the occurrence of the problem from the alarm, examines a content and a cause of the problem by use of a log reference function of the operation management software. FIG. 2 illustrates an example of referring to logs extracted by the operation management software. The log, as depicted in FIG. 2, indicates items of information such as an event occurrence date/time, an event occurrence node, a message text representing a content of the event, an event occurrence module, an error code, weight of the event, an event occurrence component, a user and identifying information. Herein, the “events” are, e.g., a variety of phenomena detected by the operation management software within the information processing system.
Further, the operation management software, when referring to the logs, supports the administrator to perform the examination with a function of narrowing down a multiplicity of accumulated logs and a function of making a keyword-based search.
FIG. 3 illustrates an example of setting log narrow-down conditions. For instance, as depicted in FIG. 3, such events are searched that “Date” is posterior to “08/10/08 04:15 PM” and “Weight” is “Warning”.
Only the reference to the logs is, however, confined to the administrator's knowing the problematic phenomenon and the occurrence location but does not reach a point of tracking down the cause in many cases. In this instance, the administrator compares the system undergoing the occurrence of the problem with the system not undergoing the occurrence of the problem, and finds out a clue for tracking down the cause of the problem according to a difference therebetween as the case may be. This is because it can happen that a component existing in the system with the occurrence of the problem but not existing in the system with non-occurrence of the problem contributes to the occurrence of the problem.
Hence, the administrator uses the functions of the operation management software to display and compare system components and attribute values of the system with the occurrence of the problem and of the system with non-occurrence of the problem.
FIG. 4 depicts a display example of a hardware configuration; FIG. 5 depicts a display example of a software configuration; and FIG. 6 depicts a display example of the attribute values.
For example, the hardware configuration is, as in FIG. 4, such that a node (Partiton#1—0.124.22.70) includes existences of components such as a housing (Chassis components) and a system board (SB#1). Further, the housing includes existences of units such as a power source (ACPDBH#0-#7) and a fan (FAN_A#0-A#5,B#0,B#1).
Moreover, the software configuration includes, as in FIG. 5, a software package name, a node name of the node to which the software belongs, an outline of the software, a category, an architecture, a version, etc., as software configuration elements.
Further, as for the attributes, as in FIG. 6, the attribute values of the node are given such as a node name, a communication address, a system ID, a hardware name, an OS name, an OS version, a hardware status, a communication status, etc.
There are numerous components and attributes of the system, and hence, when comparing two or plural systems with each other, it is a time-consuming operation for a person (administrator) to extract where a difference exists.
For this reason, there is software for extracting a difference between the two systems, and an attempt to gain higher efficiency of a comparing operation is made by use of this software.
FIG. 7 illustrates a display example of differential portions when comparing the two systems. In FIG. 7, the items to be compared are a name of the system, a model, a processor type, a memory capacity, an OS, an installation place, etc. Note that the same items in the two systems are given so that each of contents thereof is displayed in one line with no background color. For instance, in FIG. 7, the same items are the model, the processor type and the cache capacity. Further, the items having differences between the two systems are given so that each of contents is displayed on a per-line basis with the background color being varied. For example, in FIG. 7, different items are the name of the system, the memory capacity and the OS, in which the background color of the item “SLES10SP1” is provided by oblique lines, and the background color of the item “pq-rhl4u4” is provided by cross lines.    [Patent document 1] Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-55717    [Patent document 2] Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2004-101203    [Patent document 3] Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2005-63332    [Non-Patent document 1] Ichise et al.: Learning of Alignment Rules between Concept Hierarchies, Journal of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Volume 17, Third Issue F, PP. 230-238 (Year of 2002)